both right. maybe it would be worth sending a mail to theforestspeaks again telling everyone we have a highly sophisticated and extremely functional forum for the exchange of ideas and dissemination of information/news.
but i take the point. i mean, did ANYone respond to all alex' posts last night calling for vollie help? i aso feel i've had important posts go unreplied.

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." --John Cage.

yeah i think BB needs to be pushed i asked if anyone wanted help with University shit as i worked for the Student Awards Agency for Scotland and got no replies and therefor am not gonna do it anymore, but can't help thinking that maybe it's just coz about 2 people use the BB!!
The websites address should be painted on the wall in humungous text....not just big but fucking monsterous...

I think a lot of people are experiencing internet overload. They're signed up to twenty different mailing lists and their inboxes are full. In another group, we tried using a bb instead of the mailing list, and most people just didn't take the bait. Some of us did, and posted prolifically, but many people just aren't going to get in the habit of checking yet another site (they're too busy on myspace and facebook and whatever else the kids are using these days). Some don't read the emails when they're sent directly to them! It can be difficult for those of us online all the time to understand this. Can you believe it: some people don't check their email everyday!!!

yeh it could be one for digital ethics. but it has become evident that bb activity is just like the rest - a small group doing everything.
the best thing about bb is its something for the peoples to participate in instead of just being passively bombarded with speaks news letters...

perhaps set the homepage of one of the pcs in the cafe to the bb?
spread the link arround - on flyers/cia etc.
or put a news on the frontpage saying, check the bb
i think another wee newsletter to promote it could be good

the online community does need to grow. as a remote forester its a lifeline

interactive.

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." --John Cage.

Hmmm... the existence of both a forest mailing list (or more than one mailing list?) and a bb is a problem. Choose one or the other, or communication gets fractured.

Also this bb has far too many sub-forums, partially as a result of too many working groups, so hopefully we can consolidate many of them soon. But right now it must be utterly bewildering for someone who visits the bb for the first time. If you want to post something for the first time, imagine the difficulty of trying to figure out where to post it. For the weak willed the urge to give up will be irresistable.

And I think there are too many hidden forums. Do I even know about all the hidden forums now, or are there more out there? I'm not against having one hidden forum but I think any more than that becomes difficult to manage.

I'm not on any forest mailing lists so I don't know if they get used at all, but I have noticed in other groups that if given email and a bb and encouraged to use the bb, people nonetheless tend to fall back to email, which makes sense cause they all check their email anyway right? Overall though it seems to me that mailing lists and bb's are evenly matched in terms of pros and cons, and since we already seem to prefer the bb and use it, lets stick with it and make our lives easier.

Personally I don't think people need all the online communications and discussions of the forest arriving in their email inbox. This is just information overload, and either leads to people doing nothing, or to people feeling like they should do everything and then failing to achieve anything. I turned off the email notifications feature of the bb. If people are actively interested in doing something for the forest, then they can actively visit the bb for anything they need to read or post about. As long as they know about the bb, and it's simple enough. I think it makes it easier for people to filter out all the aspects they're not involved in and just contribute to what they are, and not get overloaded.

So then we need to promote the bb: simplify it, and make more people aware of how central it is.

I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!

i disagree on your first point chomee but like the second. i think it can be useful to have differing mediums, it just needs to be defined when one uses the one or the other. (e.g. should bb be down newsmail would be usefull)

but youre quite right about there being too many threads and hopefully/presumably reducing the number of WGs will help with this. i mean, sometimes you really have to dig deep to find out about stuff, and wade through a long history of posts.

personally, i always just hit "view posts since last visit" and that keeps me uptodate with all bb goings on. i usually delete the email notifications immediately but link the function of "watching" a thread and getting a mail when some one responds to your post - its a nice real-time feel.

one thing we still didnt fully explore is the Usergroups function of this BB - each WG should have a Usergroup and each member be in their respective Usergroup...users can then mass mail all and only all other users from their WG.?

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." --John Cage.

Im generally a little scared of forums...i dont know why, maybe some thread incident as a child or something. BUT im here now cuz i was took by the hand and brought down to the office and alex every so kindly registered me as a user. So there you go, force registering but with love and good intentions is the way to go.

However i will say that there are SO many places to look that takes a while to find the recent going ons. Maybe a special section for stuff posted in the past 3 days??

If you log in when you are on the BB, you can see which are the new (unread by you) messages and forums and threads containing new messages. On my home computers I have the BB page bookmarked and set the login to remember me, so with a couple of keystrokes, I'm on the block and ready to rock. Or, er, something like that anyway.

hi claire! what i always do when i go to forest bb is hit "view posts since last visit" (main screen top right) - that way i can keep up to date with all the latest news and forest happenings from thousands of miles away!

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all." --John Cage.

Claire wrote:Im generally a little scared of forums...i dont know why, maybe some thread incident as a child or something. BUT im here now cuz i was took by the hand and brought down to the office and alex every so kindly registered me as a user. So there you go, force registering but with love and good intentions is the way to go.

See! Can everyone try to encourage people to do this. I've signed up quite a few people in the past while. I hope other people are doing it, and try to explain it a bit to people, like why the different forums exist to reflect working groups, or even just, "Make sure you read the HOW TO USE THIS FORUM thing."